Liz Cheney's 'Al Qaeda Seven'

Keep America Safe,
the conservative group headed by Liz Cheney, has put out a
controversial new ad questioning the integrity of
Department of Justice lawyers tasked with defending Guantanamo
detainees. The ad calls these lawyers the "Al Qaeda Seven," although
the detainees they defended are not necessarily associated with
al-Qaeda. The appointment of lawyers for detainees has been standard practice since the Bush
administration. Cheney's ad has aroused intense anger among legal experts and pundits.

The Washington Monthly's
Steve Benen:
"I realize that right-wing political hacks are going to engage in some
pretty loathsome tactics from time to time. But the crusade against
these Justice Department officials obliterates any lines of decency or
modern norms, and should permanently discredit the cheap and tasteless
attackers."

Justice
Department spokesman Matthew Miller:
"[One of the hallmarks of] our nation's legal system is that attorneys
provide faithful representation to all sorts of clients. As John
Roberts said at his confirmation hearings, it is wrong to identify
lawyers with the client or the views the lawyer advances for the
client, and our history is replete with such examples, from John Adams
representing British soldiers to Department of Defense JAG lawyers
representing Guantanamo
detainees."

Salon's
Glenn Greenwald:
"It's
the type of McCarthyite act which would, if we had any minimal
standards in our political culture, result in the shunning of Cheney
and Kristol by all decent people [...] that disgusting duo is also
smearing countless civilian lawyers whose work since 9/11 has been
nothing short of
heroic."

Retired Air
Force Colonel Morris Davis,
former lead military commissions prosecutor: "It is absolutely
outrageous for the Cheney-Grassley crowd to try to tar and feather
[some of the attorneys] and insinuate they are al-Qaeda supporters. You
don't hear anyone refer to John Adams as a turncoat for representing
the Brits in the Boston Massacre
trial."

TalkingPointsMemo's
Justin Elliott:
"In
Liz Cheney's worldview, Rudy Giuliani is a disloyal al Qaeda
sympathizer." Why? A top lawyer at Giuliani's firm is working on two of
the cases that Cheney's group is so upset
about.

The Atlantic's
Chris Bodenner:
"Not only does she presume that all suspected terrorists are guilty
before due process, but she ignores the reality that only a fraction of
the detainees held at Gitmo were even accused of Al-Qaeda ties in the
first place."

The Washington Independent's
Spencer Ackerman:
Senator
Chuck Grassley, who has joined Cheney's campaign, "knows exactly what
he's doing. He's taking one of the strengths of the American justice
system -- the fact that everyone is entitled to legal representation --
and implying that it's unseemly. It's a testament to the weakness of
his character that he will never forthrightly accuse these attorneys of
what he's implying -- sympathy with accused terrorists -- in a way that
they could refute. What a pathetic excuse for a
man."

People For the
American Way President Michael Keegan:
"Joseph
McCarthy himself couldn't have done a better job of using fear and
insinuations to smear his political enemies. Most Americans understand
that McCarthyism was a shameful chapter in American history, but the
Cheney wing of the Republican Party seems to have embraced Senator
McCarthy's utter lack of
shame."

Science
blogger Ed Brayton: "Those
men fought for a bare minimum of legal rights for the detainees at
Gitmo, something even the Supreme Court agrees it is our responsibility
to give them both under the Constitution and our treaty obligations.
And your pathetic demagoguery to paint them as traitors only reflects
on the intrinsically un-American nature of your position."

The attorneys who challenged the Bush administration's
national-security policies saw themselves as fulfilling their legal
obligations by fighting an unconstitutional power grab. At heart, this
was a disagreement over process: Should people accused of terrorism be
afforded the same human rights and due process protections as anyone
else in American custody? But rather than portray the dispute as a
conflict over what is and isn't within constitutional bounds,
conservatives argue that anyone who opposed the Bush administration's
policies is a traitor set to undermine America's safety from within the
Justice Department.